


Bounce, rebounce

by JaqofSpades



Category: Battlestar Galactica, Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, some Sam/Kara but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:03:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Even here, on this makeshift court on their tin can world, the purity of line and angle and inevitability sings to her, lullaby and homecoming and siren song.”  Or, Starbuck plays Pyramid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bounce, rebounce

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lodessa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/gifts).



> I am new to watching BSG, and have also played somewhat fast and loose with some details of canon here for the sake of convenience. Happy 'a month past your birthday but also school's out' for the amazing, always supportive Lodessa.

She gives herself to the game even before she crosses into the triangle, frame loose for speed, attention locked on the ball.  Two minutes watching the play and she knows how she’ll take it: a charge, a low sweep, then a simple transfer of weight to send it hurtling towards the hungriest goalmouth. Even here, on this makeshift court in their tin can world, the purity of line and angle and inevitability sings to her, lullaby and homecoming and siren song.

 “Yeah baby,” she moans back, and dives in on the bounce.  She’s airborne for the rebounce, then snatches the ball close, heedless of the other players falling around her like pins.  They all want the easy shot, so she takes the impossible one, hurtling it towards the goal on the far side of the court.  The arc through the air is so beautiful that joy twists in her chest even before it drops silently into the hole, not even shaking the backboard in its passing.

Her dominance surges through the team like a wave, catcalls and friendly banter escalating to something more ferocious, curses and taunts and some nugget jeering about what she and Sam do in bed.  Her husband must have been one of the players she’d climbed over to get the ball, she realises.  She’ll have to make up for that later, but right now …

Bounce.  Rebounce.  Scoop and fling and score.

It isn’t about the win, though she lives for that.  Not even the adrenaline rush, or the chance to punch through the anger that seems to dog her steps. Pyramid’s great gift to Kara Thrace is something altogether more important.

Get her on that court, and her mother was just another shrieking harpy lost in the crowd. Zak was a bright, hungry face in a sea of them, rather than a beloved dilemma.  Sam was one more wall of flesh between her and the goal.

Lee. 

She forces her attention back to the run of play, to the vibration underfoot as she pivots on the unforgiving deck, to the muscle pulling across her back and the familiar stab in her bad knee.  She can’t think about Lee.  Not now.

Or she’ll end up trying to put someone in the fucking ground.

“It’s all just a game of Pyramid to you, isn’t it?” he’d shouted, a lifetime ago.  Two or three, if she’s counting.  Before New Caprica. Before they’d beat the shit out of each other and did their best to destroy two marriages.  Before they’d agreed to keep trying, to be …

Whatever it is they are now.

Kara laughs as Helo backs into her, trying to get his big body between her and the ball.  She surrenders to the urge to slap his ass, then quickly wrongfoots him as he squawks his surprise.  The ball flies past her ear and she pulls it back with a flick of her fingertips, then wraps around it as he encloses her in those long arms. She wriggles, forcing him inch by inch towards the number 7 goal, hustling, hustling, her mad chortle rising between them as they tussle.  She can feel Sam’s annoyance rising on the other side of the court and can’t help her snort of impatience. Helo isn’t the problem, buddy.   Not like she hasn’t been there, he’s big and beautiful and fraks like a god, but … they’re both in love with someone else. 

Pyramid, she hisses to herself, line and angle and if you can predict the bounce, guide it … she dives for the ball, momentum meeting pure trust as she grabs and twists and throws, blind.  The cheer rises, but it’s drowned out by the silky taunts of the universe in her inner ear – which him, Starbuck?  Which love?

“Which play?” she mutters to herself as she pushes up to her feet, only to find Anders right there, so close her fist slams into him before she can call it back.

“What the _frak_ , Kara?”

Starbuck, she wants to growl, out here it’s all Starbuck, but her own hypocrisy catches her out because she’s never liked the way it sounds in his mouth.  She might have been all rootin’, tootin, guns-blazing when they met, but something in him only sees Kara.

She hates that about him. Hates how he’d do anything for that stupid, damaged girl.  Lee, now – Lee had met Kara but fallen in love with Starbuck.

That first game of Pyramid.  Frak.  Thinking about it was a one-way trip to drowning in a black pit of guilt, but – she couldn’t forget.  There wasn’t a cell in her body that would allow her to.

There hadn’t been a court, or even a proper ball, but they’d hustled their way from one end of the street to the other, shooting the crumpled can at gaps in the sidewalk, and a dumpster, and a pile of mouldering rags. Zak had been a sodden mess, propped against the wall as he tried to follow the play, oblivious to what was happening right in front of his face.

The heat of his body making her gasp when she threw herself against him, a move she’d never had to question before.  Hands, slow where they were usually fast, the hard planes of his belly quivering under her fingers.  His cock, rising against her ass as they tussled for the ball.

Maybe she’d been trying to stop it the way she’d slamdunked the thing into a hungry drain, calling an end to play.  Or maybe …

Like there was a point trying to dissect that so many years on.  They’d been like a drug for each other, her and Lee, right from the very start, that first night with Lee at the door, flowers in frakking hand, dumbfounded.  She hadn’t been much better, but they’d managed to laugh and tease their way past it, right up till Zak had passed out on the couch, and they’d settled into doing shots, talking shit and laughing.  But then she’d had to be Kara, impossible, self-sabotaging Kara, one double dog dare away from disaster, and they’d nearly done it.  Betrayed Zak.

(Sometimes she tells herself they would have stopped.  Even if she hadn’t knocked that glass off the table, something else would have brought them to their senses. Some stray shred of basic decency.  Then she remembers the feel of Lee’s hands gripping her thighs, and the way his lips had seemed to burn against her skin.  How it had made her whine for him.  And she knows the truth.)

What does it say about them that it had started – it always seems to start – with insults and mockery? He’d laughed aloud when she took potshots at his fancy College, and smiled indulgently when she pooh-poohed his obviously impressive training stats.  He didn’t even try to hit back until she jabbed hard at what was clearly a very sore spot.

“How long does an Adama have to be a lowly LT before he makes Captain anyway?” she’d drawled, leaning forward to catch his reaction. It had been glorious, too, his gaze yanked up from her cleavage to connect with her own, his soft, warm blue suddenly burning hotter.

She wanted him to be petulant and bitchy in his fury, but instead his jaw firmed and his voice slid lower to rasp across her every exposed nerve.

“Probably about as long as you would if you didn’t keep ending up in hack,” he’d growled, challenge snapping in his eyes.  “What’s that about, Starbuck?  You so comfy at the Academy that you can’t be bothered mixing it with the big boys?” 

She’d stalked around to square up to him, left hook at the ready, two sets of shoulders locked and backs rigid and obstinate chins daring each other to take the hit.  “Real big,” she’d croaked, throat dry, forefinger wiggling to show her disdain.

He’d snorted at her immaturity and she’d cracked a grin and was congratulating herself on successfully defusing the moment when his gaze fell to her lips, suddenly more hungry than angry. 

Frak, she’d thought.  Oh, _frak_.

She was unable to hide her shudder of response, and didn’t even try to stop what came next, their bodies lurching together and mouths fusing, her hands pulling at his belt even as he pushed her shirt up to discover the deep, wine-red bra she’d worn for her lover.

Zak’s favourite colour, she remembers thinking as his brother pushed the cups down to shape her breasts in his hands.  He would rhapsodise over the contrast of the rich colour against her pale skin, but Lee seemed more intent in liberating her from its clutches.  Touching her.

Tasting her, she groans, her entire body set in reminding her how he’d rolled her aching nipples between thumb and forefinger, and mouthed his appreciation against her skin as he licked a maddening path from one nipple to the other, and then back again.

“Frak you,” she’d moaned, “Gods, Apollo, just …”

She’d never finished the plea because he’d closed his mouth around a nipple then, lashing at it with his tongue, then pulling it between careful teeth.  She’s grateful, now.  Grateful that he took the initiative, and grateful that she didn’t beg.

Because she’d had one leg wrapped around his waist, grinding shamelessly onto his thigh, her jeans already agape. If she’d been able to say anything in that moment, do anything other than pant and moan, it wouldn’t have been “stop” or “no” or “we can’t.”

He’d had to say those things, and she’d nearly fought him on it.  Wondered what he’d do if she’d pushed his fancy dress pants down and licked her way up to his cock.  Just pushed him back on that table and clambered right on.   Taken possession.

But the bounce wrongfooted them, her wriggle backwards sending a glass smashing to the floor, Zak’s boozy “whah?” bringing them back to the situation with unparalleled clarity.  No time for shame or recriminations then, just a furtive race to put their clothes to rights and the table between them.

“It didn’t bounce,” she shrugs apologetically, then yawns, and tells them she’s turning in.  She’d locked herself in the shower, trying not to cry as she got herself off with vicious, clumsy fingers, then kicked a hole in the wall, horny and furious and ashamed.

Four months, she’d had to stare at that hole.  Four months of reminders that she’d loved a man enough to wear his ring, but didn’t have enough self-control to keep her hands off his brother. She couldn’t even say no once they’d crossed the line. Lee had been the one to do that.

It’s probably gone now, that frakking hole in the wall that shamed her into behaving for a little while at least. Obliterated, just like Zak, and her mother, and most of the human race.   Not her guilt, though.  That steaming pile of Gods-cursed karma follows her wherever she goes, stinking up the place a little more every time she hurts someone, fails someone, kills someone.

Except here.  It can’t find her, here.

“Throw in the frakking ball,” she yells, and play restarts, her entire body sagging with relief as the emotional storm clogging her chest is blasted away by the flood of adrenalin as she leaps, pivots, burns.

Bounce, rebounce.  New frame.

*

She’d heard about the custom-built, regulation court on Pegasus long before she’d even set foot on the ship. They’d even had their own team in the league, once, but only a handful of them had been on board when the attacks came.  They’d heard about her too.

“Shit hot pilot, lousy ball player,” Poloniak grins, and Stratos simply slings a ball at her head.  They’re the only friendly faces she sees in that first week, the other pilots going out of their way to snub her, and the CAG clearly hating her on principle.

Within a month, her game is the best it’s ever been, dud knee or not.  Especially once she figures out Pegasus wasn’t a place to end up in the brig.  Wasn’t a place to be Starbuck at all, except on the court. 

But without Apollo, there doesn’t seem much point to being Starbuck anymore.  She locks it down, does her best to behave, and for every scornful glance and muttered curse, thrashes one of their idols on the court.  Finds herself playing dirty and mean, like everyone else on Cain’s too-shiny showboat, and hates herself for it.  Looking back now, she wonders if maybe it saved her life.  Her career, definitely, because she ends up as CAG, and then Cain is dead, and Lee takes command.

The entire ship bristles, and things get even uglier than they had been.  She waits, hope glowing in chest like a fool.  Just a glance, or a hug.  The heat in his gaze that used to fire every time he wished her good hunting.

But he looks straight past her.

Not in actuality, but in effect.  “Captain Thrace,” and his voice holds the same false bonhomie it has for everyone else.  “I’ll take your report now.”

So she stiffens her back and thrusts her chin in the air and takes him through the stats, birds and pilots and fuel and schedules and costs.

“Very good, Captain,” he smiles and she’d wants to knock his teeth down his throat.  But the CAP couldn’t wait, and besides.  She had a hot date with a Viper, and if that doesn’t do it, smashing a few balls about afterwards certainly will.

It’s nearly 0100 when he tracked her down, too tired to stand anymore but still practicing her rimshot from a sprawl in one corner of the court. He’d abandoned his blues, come dressed in tanks and sweats as if he was looking to play, but doesn’t cross the line. Just stands there, watching her punt the ball at the backboard, then drag another one out of the basket, too lazy to collect the previous.

“You mad at me?”

She holds the scream inside and offers platitudes, the sort of hollow words her shipmates confused with professionalism. “No sir.  Is there a problem?”

His snort was the most of Lee she’d seen in months.

“Frak that bullshit.  We need to get past whatever this is, because I need your help, Kara.  This place --” he shudders, and takes a step towards her, an intruder on her court.

“Get past this!” The cold logistics of her Pegasus game vanish into pure fury, the ball hurtling towards his head, forcing him to dodge or catch. He’s quick, though, he’s always been quick and he’s able to deflect it into a bounce before swooping around to direct it into the nearest goal.

It hits the backboard – sloppy, but still a point – and his delight lights something else in her belly.  But she’s not letting him off easy.  “Frak you, Lee.  I’d forgotten you used to be good at this.”

(He wouldn’t play with her, after Zak.  She’d heard about his game, how light on his feet he was, his almost preternatural sense for the goal, but her own guilt had refused to allow her to witness it first hand.)

“Wasn’t exactly my thing.”

She splutters in disbelief.  Liar, liar, flight suit on fire.  She’d felt it the press of his body and the way they’d flowed together – he’d loved it. Right up until she’d killed it for him.

“Just couldn’t take losing, huh?”

“Nah.  I’m not a fan of hurting people, Kara.”

“Starbuck,” she corrects, and throws the next ball high in the air, her entire body vibrating with the need to slam and rend and tear.  He could deny it all he wanted, but Lee snatches it straight off the bounce and is already firing at the far goal before she’s even finished grinning.  She laughs aloud, practically howls, and then slams herself into him, merciless.

He pushes her feet out from under her and recovers the ball, bouncing it off a backboard to let him reposition.

“Oh, he’s gonna _hustle_ ,” she crows, and unleashes Starbuck, all elbows and body blocks and a tackle so ferocious it leaves them stretched out on the floor, her hands pulling at his as he wraps himself around the ball.

So she may have tickled him to get him to release it, and he may have recovered with a lunge that throws her onto her back, her hands trapped between them.

“And what will my hotshot pilot do now?” he’d teases, settling his full length over her to still her struggles.

She’d like to say she’d tried, but that would be a lie.  She’d missed him too much, for too long, and the return of Lee, of his teasing smile and the blue eyes that were inexplicably warmer when he looked at her, saw her, has her buzzing with joy.  And the other thing that had always been their curse, the catch in her breath and the syncopation of their heartbeats, _thud, thud, thud,_ tension coiling tighter with every beat.  They’re merely waiting for the bounce.

 “Suck your cock, sir?’

Alarm flashes in his eyes and she knows she’s gone too far.  They weren’t in that place anymore.  Her timing is all wrong.  (For a ballplayer, her timing had always sucked.)  But -

The muscle in his jaw twitches as he makes a sound in his throat, an attempt at telling her no.  It doesn’t take, and by the time he finds his voice, her hand is sliding south, cupping him, hard and ready and _hers_.

He still tries, though.  “Not funny, captain,” he groans, even as he shifts under her hand, rubbing like a cat.

“Not joking, Apollo,” she murmurs against his skin, her teeth nipping, tongue laving as she worked along the line of his jaw. “What was the score?”

“Tied on six.”

“Call this the tiebreaker then.”

She was sure she’d won, right up until the moment she knows she lost.  He’d shouted when her tongue flicked at the vein under his cock, voice rough as he begged her to stop, to get the fuck out of her tanks, to ride him.

To come for him, come all over his cock, come again.

“Apollo,” she’d sobbed, and he’d surged underneath her, hands on her hips, slamming her down into him, filling the quiet hangar with the slap of their bodies, the madness of their vows.

“You’re mine,” he’d gritted out.  “Mine!”

Yes, her body screamed.  Her soul.  Starbuck was always yours. 

“Kara!” he’d shouted, and the world tips, tilts.  Bounces wild.

She remembers howling like one of the Furies.  The jealous one, perhaps.  But it brought her back, that pain.  She’d been able to grin, and lick her lips salaciously, and pretend it was just another fuck.  Just another play.

 “Your game needs work,” she’d grinned.  “Too easy, Commander.”

They meet every few rotations after that.  Slam the ball around, slam each other up against the bulkheads.  Commander Adama and his troublesome CAG in the CIC, Starbuck and Apollo on the court.

Never Kara and Lee.

She can see the sadness in his eyes sometimes, the yearning, but if he can’t remember how vulnerable it made them, she would remember it for him.  It works, too.  She is so proud, when he orders her to stay behind and detonate that bomb. He can barely look her in the eye afterwards, but she knows he has become the Commander Pegasus needed.  The Fleet needed.

She rages at him, tries to beat the sorrow out of him, but still he looks at her with shame in those ice-chip eyes.  And the other thing that glistens behind it, that makes a lie of what he did, who they are. 

Starbuck and Apollo, warriors.  That’s what matters.

(So maybe Kara turns her face to the wall in her bunk some nights, and shudders silently through her grief and rage.  Works out her abandonment issues.  Doesn’t smile for a while, after.)

Starbuck is proud, no matter what Kara had to say.  Apollo did his duty, and trusted her to do hers. She pins that on her sleeve, ignores the mewling little creature inside, and lets Starbuck run the play.

Double bounced, stolen, slamdunked.  New frame.

*

Planetside, the ground shifts underfoot and the stubborn drizzle transforms everything to mud after just a few hours of play.  So many things to remember, so high on forgetting.  The smell of the soil, the speed of a game with someone who knows what they were doing.  Sam.

Her husband.

He has a way of grinning at her that lightens her soul, makes her grin back.  Sometimes she actually forgets about Lee, in her waking hours at least.

Exhausting herself at the mine doesn’t work, and nor do the hours of Pyramid the minute she’s done working.  She still dreams of that clearing, and the joy in his voice, and their voices echoing into the night. 

Lee Adama loves Kara Thrace.

Kara Thrace loves Lee Adama. 

It hadn’t been a promise.  It had been a confession, one that let her pull her clothes on as she shivered in the predawn chill, and walk away.  The solution had been obvious.

Kara Anders.

She’d bailed Sam up, told him she was ready, and let him believe she was up for the whole little wifey routine.  Lied, basically.

Because Kara Anders doesn’t exist anymore than Starbuck did.  Just her latest, greatest mask.  Course, she hadn’t figured that out until it had all been ripped away, the face of a little girl who looked just like her too much truth for one shit-scared coward to handle.  She was a mother, and a daughter, a lover, and a wife.  Kara.

The Harbinger of Death.

Not that she believed a frakking thing out of their lying Cylon mouths.  She couldn’t even trust Leoben to stay frakking dead.  Not when her daughter turned out not to be her daughter after all, just a pretty child stolen from another woman to fool poor, gullible Kara Thrace.

She didn’t come down in the last rainstorm, and all their crap about destiny and her mission is obviously some Cylon trick to mess with her head.  She’s not buying it. Not as she fights her way through the bodies to the ship, and not when the Old Man tallies up the losses and she can feel the horror of it twisting in her belly.  They’d just plucked her off the planet, but … thousands.  Thousands hadn’t made it.

(What does harbinger mean anyway?  She’s always danced with death.  Never feared it.  What decent pilot would?)

Kara Thrace is the Harbinger of Death.

But she didn’t even feel alive. 

Couldn’t play.

Caught on the bounce.  No rebounce.  New game.

*

They beat each other bloody, then fall together, hot puffs of sorrow and regret sobbed into each other’s skin.  She can barely breathe for the pain in her ribs, and she’s not sure she can make words with her mincemeat lips, but they rise, ungovernable, anyway.

“Missed you.”

The howling crowd quiets to scandalised whispers and she knows it’s this show they’re putting on, with Sam and Dee standing right there.

They do try. Just not hard enough.  They do the rosters, between them, and it’s only a small overlap in their down time.  Just a quick audit of the tylium ship, and no one available to pilot the Raptor besides Starbuck.  The rolling standdowns had been the Old Man’s idea, when it had become obvious how tired the pilots had gotten.  Mere coincidence that Starbuck and Apollo had a whole eight hours that coincided, and he’d booked them a room to commit adultery the traditional way.

Starbuck never slept well in an actual bed, but it doesn’t matter – it’s not like they were there to sleep.  She wakes with a jerk in the unfamiliar darkness, and only when the reek of sex in the room registers does she remember exactly where she is.  Cloud 9, with Lee.  Breaking two sets of wedding vows.  She lets the wrongness of it sink in, torment her, then throws one leg over his hips to glide her swollen, sex-drenched pussy over his rapidly awakening cock.

When she comes, it’s so good that she forgets to care whether she called him Apollo, or Lee.

Dangerous game.  _Stupid_ game.  Cruel game.

*

Earth.  They find Earth.

The charred air is foul in her mouth, and that’s just the start of the nightmares waiting for her on the burnt planet.  Maybe it’s the cold, or maybe its rigor mortis settling into her bones as she watches her body burn.  Even before Baltar’s tests come back … she knew.

It wasn’t like before.  Her soul was dead then.  Now, it’s just her body.

It’s a liberation, in a way.  It kills the want.  She tries to awaken herself, tries so hard with Sam, then turns her attention to Lee, but the only compulsion she has now is to keep going, to lead them.  To find the place they’ll all find their end.

Her destiny.

She only falters once.  Watching her fellow pilots, people she’s flown with, turn on the Old Man sends fury thundering in her veins, waking something in her.  Apollo dances through the corridors next to her, cold and focused and flecked with blood, and desire blindsides her.  She lunges towards him, licking her way into his mouth to taste him, memorise him, ferocious with love and lust.  He kisses her back, every bit as fervent, then they move out without speaking, slinking through the corridors of Galactica with predatory intent.  

Magnificent, her ballplayer heart cries as she watches him take out mutineer after mutineer as they make their way towards the Hack, looking for Athena and Helo and Sam. She’s worried – out of her frakking mind with it – but still.  It’s sublime.  This is what they are made for, fighting their way through the ship side by side, using their strength and their smarts and their unparalleled badass to smash, rule, dominate …

They fight like she plays Pyramid and he flies like she plays Pyramid and they fit, like this.  But maybe it’s only like this, some sensible part of her says gently.  After all, she’s more than just Starbuck, now.  And he’s not Apollo anymore, no matter how spoiled with blood that pretty suit gets.

He’s Representative Adama, and she’s the Harbinger of Death, and neither of them have time for games. Nor the taste for it, not anymore, not with his wife dead and her husband in a coma.

Bounce, rebounce.  New game.

*

They play.

She marks out the goals with a slab of red chalk, simple circles on opposing rock faces.  He’d dragged a stick in the dirt to mark the court, but she looks askance at the tiny triangle and tells him they may as well use all the space available, since it had taken them four hours to find this godsdamned canyon. So it’s less Pyramid and more a lopsided rectangle.

Does the job, though.   She’s trying not to keep track of solar hours and scrutinising every shadow that passes across this too-yellow sun, but there’s a lightness in her heart now that tells her, he’s done it.  Sam’s gone.  The end has started.

Sam is gone, and she is free, and today is the day she says goodbye to Lee.

She pitches the ball at his head and laughs when he catches it and immediately hurls it back.  “We do have goals, Apollo.”

“I know, Starbuck,” he teases, and backs her towards one jagged rock wall.  “I just want to make sure you fully appreciate just how much I’m going to enjoy beating your ass.”

“Leave my ass out of it,” she grins, then fells him with a shoulder rush.  “Unless, of course, you wanna watch it leave.”  A bounce, another, and then a wild toss as the split in the rockface.

“Rebound!”

“That was a goal.  If we had a goal, it would have been one,” she protests, then tosses him the ball anyway.

“You going soft, Starbuck.”

“Just play the game, Lee.  And down here, I’m Kara.”

(They’d had their own ceremony, the pilots.  Run one last set of manoeuvres, then set them down softly on the hard deck, best set of landings she’d ever seen. Said goodbye to their birds, one at a time.  Saluted.  She hadn’t been the only one with tears running down her face.) 

He steps in close, and she meets him halfway, accepting the shelter of his arms.  Presses their foreheads together and breathes him in.

“Kara,” he agrees, dropping a kiss into her hair.  

She tilts her head to taste the sound of her name on his lips, then reaches up higher, licking at the salt of his tears.  Somehow, he knows.  Is she that frakking predictable?

Kara sniffs, then snorts as she fights away the sadness rising in her chest.  She's on borrowed time here.  Crying over it won't change shit.  Try being thankful for once, Starbuck.

“Goodbye, Lee.  I did love you, you know.”

"What?  Where's this coming from?" he mumbles, then grips her harder.  "Don't go."

She pushes him back a step, then picks up the ball at his feet.  "Sorry, Lee.  Game's over.  For me at least."

By rights, she should take it with her.  Alien technology and all that.   But she bounces it towards him, an underhand pass, and he has to pivot and stretch to take it on the rebounce.

_Line and angle and inevitability.  Let them keep that._

Lee hits the painted target dead on, his shout of triumph resounding through the canyon.  "Did you _see_ that?"

But she's gone.

_fin_


End file.
